It has been 30 years since the first findings that heart attacks are most common in the early morning. Since then, research has revealed that those first three hours after waking are also when a cardiac event is most damaging. In fact, the whole cardiovascular system is controlled by circadian rhythms that influence the likelihood of stroke, kidney failure, and heart attacks.
If this new knowledge about circadian rhythms has taught us anything, it is the value of time as a dimension in medicine. Many physiological changes are tied to 24-hour body rhythms, and these changes have been revealed, in part, through continuous monitoring of the same individuals through time. Other forms of vigilant patient-tracking—sometimes over decades for a single person—have demonstrated that to understand how diseases develop, there is no substitute for watching someone's health change in real time.
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